Embers of War (111 page)

V

IN THE MINDS OF SOUTHERN INSURGENT COMMANDERS, HANOI’S
move to step up its involvement in the south came not a moment too soon. For simultaneously, the Diem government had opted to escalate its efforts to crush the revolutionary movement through a new draconian directive known as 10/59. Passed in May 1959, Decree 10/59 restored the French guillotine to Vietnam and gave the regime vast new repressive powers by widening the scope of political crimes to include virtually all forms of political opposition. Within three days of a charge, a special roving court could sentence to death “whoever commits or attempts to commit … crimes with the aim of sabotage, or of infringing upon the security of the State,” as well as “whoever belongs to an organization designed to help or to perpetuate [these] crimes.” There would be no right of appeal. The number of arrests skyrocketed as local officials, aided by the roving tribunals, arbitrarily consigned opponents of all kinds to life in prison or death—or used the threat of conviction as a lever by which to extract bribes from a frightened populace.
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The 10/59 law was effective as a tactic of intimidation, but like so many of Diem’s policies it also boomeranged, dealing a heavy blow against whatever progress the regime had made in legitimating its claim to rule. In many parts of South Vietnam, the decree gave fuel to the insurgency. “Thanks to the 10/59 decree,” said a poor peasant in My Tho province who had been largely unconnected to the revolution before then, “new life was blown into the political movement, and a patriotic appeal was made to overthrow the government of Mr. Diem because this government was killing people like that, so it led to another war and renewed fighting.”
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In other areas too, government attempts to thwart the Communist challenge faltered. In 1959, Diem undertook to relocate lowland-dwelling peasants in fortified “agrovilles” where they could be kept isolated from what Saigon officials now derisively called the “Viet Cong” (Vietnamese Communists). In theory, these fortified concentrations were designed to be self-sustaining and to provide a range of social services for their inhabitants. In practice, the promised amenities seldom materialized. Even worse, the measure required peasants to leave their old homes, with their family tombs and gardens and groves, for a barren plot of land in an unfamiliar place. Government financial assistance was minimal—about five dollars plus a small loan to help pay for the acre and a half of land that each farmer received. Though only a fraction of the half million peasants initially targeted for the program ultimately participated, the agrovilles became for many peasants an enduring symbol of their hatred for the South Vietnamese regime. Or as the
Pentagon Papers
chronicler would later put it, the relocations “catalyzed the most widespread and dangerous anti-GVN sentiment.”
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Many in the countryside had no love for either side in the conflict and sought only to steer clear of trouble. This did not mean, though, that villagers were necessarily politically equidistant from the government and the revolutionaries. As political scientist David Elliott writes of My Tho province in this period, “a probable majority of the villagers were seething with indignation against the GVN and its local officials,” even if they were afraid to show their anger in a rapidly evolving situation. “At the time,” Elliott quotes a peasant as saying, “the people were outwardly deferential to the government, but inwardly they didn’t respect it. Their outward deference was based on fear of imprisonment and death. They were really scared, but they still protected the cadres.”
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In Ben Tre province in the southern Mekong Delta, a Viet Minh stronghold during the French war, Diem’s campaign to stamp out all Communist influence had by one measure been phenomenally successful: In the period 1954–59, some 90 percent of cadres in Ben Tre were killed or thrown in jail. But the revolutionary forces in the province did not completely disappear, and in 1959, led by Nguyen Thi Dinh, a widow whose husband had died in the notorious French island prison in Paolo Condore in 1938, they gained rapidly in popular support.
⁴⁷
Madame Dinh organized protests and instructed women on how to confront government troops. She taught them the signals for when to disperse and when to stand their ground in the village square. She pleaded for weapons and, when told none were available, proceeded anyway with plans to stage an uprising in the province. Launched in January 1960, this carefully coordinated series of insurrections achieved considerable success, as insurgents seized isolated posts and captured local leaders. Some of the officials were executed; others were set free after being warned. Cadres also infiltrated the agroville at Thanh Thoi and destroyed it with the assistance of villagers who had been relocated there. In several districts, land held by “reactionary landlords” was seized and redistributed to poor peasants. Diem responded with a show of force, and ARVN forces succeeded in regaining control, but at considerable expense and loss of life.
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“The forces encircling the posts had been ordered to burn down any posts they captured,” Madame Dinh later said of the assaults on a government-held village. “The people immediately tore up the flags, and burned the plaques bearing their house numbers and family registers. On the roads, the villagers cut down trees to erect barriers and block the movement of the enemy.… All the posts were surrounded by the people who made appeals to the soldiers through bullhorns.… It was a night of terrifying thunder and lightning striking the enemy on their heads. Attacked by surprise, they were scared out of their wits and stayed put in the posts.”
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Some American observers insouciantly dismissed the growing unrest as inconsequential, as of no real importance when set against the larger picture of South Vietnamese stability and growth. In early 1959, for example, the newly retired director of the U.S. aid program in Saigon gave a glowing report of the progress achieved since 1954 and pronounced the current situation “good.” On July 7, the fifth anniversary of Diem’s ascension to power,
The New York Times
gushed: “A five-year miracle, not a ‘plan,’ has been carried out. Vietnam is free and becoming stronger in defense of its freedom and of ours. There is reason, today, to salute President Ngo Dinh Diem.”
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At MAAG headquarters too, senior officers continued to insist that the picture was bright. Like their French predecessors in 1953, who stubbornly insisted that their forces “controlled” the Red River Delta inside the perimeter of the De Lattre Line, U.S. commanders used the absence of direct challenge against main ARVN forces in many areas of the south as proof that those forces were “in control.” Like the French before them, these American generals were not, as Bernard Fall would put it, “technically or psychologically geared to evaluate the far subtler challenges presented by revolutionary war.”
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When the ARVN stepped up sweep operations in the second half of 1959, inflicting heavy losses in lives and property to the peasants, thus increasing their resentment of the regime, it did so with full U.S. endorsement and support.

VI

SOME AMERICAN ANALYSTS, HOWEVER, DID PERCEIVE THE NATURE
of the threats. Almost to a person, they didn’t like the trend lines. Wolf Ladejinsky, who still believed in the South Vietnamese experiment and in the importance of maintaining a robust American assistance program, was despondent after senior Saigon officials told him that Diem was relying far too much on military methods to defeat the Viet Cong. When these men tried to persuade Diem of the importance of winning the active support of the peasantry, he offered that same reply he always gave to such pleas: that military security must come first.

Ambassador Durbrow, after listening to Ladejinsky recap the conversation, voiced his own fear that the Communists would exploit the growing disaffection in the rural areas to intensify opposition to the government. But the problems went beyond the countryside. To Durbrow it was increasingly apparent that Diem was losing the confidence of urban intellectuals as well as administrative and business leaders. Even those who owed their positions to the regime and professed personal loyalty to Diem chafed at the restrictions on press freedom as well as the administrative inefficiency and widespread nepotism and corruption.

But Durbrow saw little point in arguing for a change in U.S. policy. The Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), created by Eisenhower early in his tenure to bring together national security views across a range of agencies and therefore a good barometer of midlevel official attitudes, announced gravely in early 1959 that the Communists had begun a “carefully planned campaign of violence” against Diem using tactics employed with success against the French. The OCB further reported increased dissatisfaction, within the South Vietnamese military and government, with Diem’s repressive leadership and the stifling power of his family. What could the United States do? Precious little, the OCB concluded. Washington’s influence remained “greatly limited” due to Diem’s “extreme sensitivity.”
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The characterization was apt. As the decade drew a close, American leverage with Diem, not high to begin with, had declined further. Try as U.S. officials might to get him to broaden his government, to show more sensitivity to the needs of his people, to show greater tolerance for the expression of political opposition, they got nowhere. Instead Diem, his utter confidence in his own political instincts wholly unimpaired, turned increasingly inward, relying almost exclusively on an ever-shrinking circle of confidants headed by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. More than ever, personal loyalty, rather than ability and efficiency, became the criterion for promotion and reward. More than ever, Catholics were favored. And more than ever, Diem and Nhu regarded the formal apparatus of Western-style democracy—such as giving greater authority to the National Assembly and allowing it to be a forum for substantive debate—as a dangerous distraction that would do little but give voice to dangerous political opponents among the urban elite.
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The Americans did not understand this danger, the brothers allowed, but then Americans were naïve and softhearted, lacking maturity in world affairs and a deep grasp of Vietnamese realities. Nhu in particular argued this line. Disdainful, like many French-educated Vietnamese intellectuals, of the brash Anglo-Saxons, he contemptuously told an ARVN officer that the French might have been the colonial masters, but at least they understood Vietnam, whereas the United States “helps us with a lot of money but doesn’t know anything about Vietnamese affairs.”
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It bothered the brothers no end that they had been pinned with the
My-Diem
“puppet” tag. They hated relying so heavily on U.S. assistance, hated what this dependence did to their nationalist credentials and their freedom of maneuver. But though they would try at all times to maintain maximum autonomy, they knew there could be no question of severing the tie. “If you bring in the American dog,” Diem told a reporter, “you must accept American fleas.”
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CIA officers and embassy personnel in Saigon were well aware of this creeping anti-Americanism infesting the House of the Ngos, and it frustrated them. Behind closed doors, they returned the favor with a few choice words of their own, especially for the vain and arrogant Nhu, who demanded continued U.S. aid on a massive scale even as he gave Washington the proverbial one-finger salute. But they could do no more than quietly grumble. They knew what Diem knew: that the United States, determined to maintain a non-Communist bastion in southern Vietnam and seeing no plausible leadership alternative anywhere on the scene, needed Diem at least as much as he needed the United States. In the perpetual contest of wills, between stopping the American assistance or enacting comprehensive reforms, Diem won easily, just as he always had (apart from a moment’s wavering at the height of the sect crisis in 1955).

And so, America’s Vietnam planners chose once again to travel that familiar and easy and well-trod course: the course of least immediate resistance. They had opted to forge ahead and hope for the best, rather than face the unpleasant task of initiating a fundamental change in policy. This had been the pattern under Harry Truman, and it had continued through Dwight Eisenhower’s two terms. Never blind to the obstacles standing in their way, U.S. decision makers through the decade of the 1950s stayed firm in their commitment to thwart Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ambitions. Even if the odds for success were long, it was always safer, easier—in domestic political as well as geopolitical terms—to soldier on, to muddle through, especially given that for America the superpower colossus, the Saigon commitment remained small, in both material and manpower terms. Diem, for all his deficiencies, had beaten the odds before; perhaps he could do so again.

Eisenhower has been praised by some historians for his prudence in keeping the United States out of the Indochina quagmire. But this analysis largely conflates his overall restraint in foreign policy—including in the broader Cold War—with his more aggressive approach to crises in the Third World, including in Vietnam. In 1954, he and Dulles were prepared to intervene directly to save the French position in the Indochina War, and came close to doing so; in the years thereafter, they gambled that they could build a new state in southern Vietnam with a mercurial and unproven leader. As the Saigon government skidded and careened down treacherous roads in the late 1950s, Eisenhower, his attention mostly on other foreign policy concerns and his trusted Dulles no longer by his side as of early 1959, ordered no reevaluation, even though an insurgency was under way in South Vietnam and even though Diem continued business as usual, rejecting all calls to enact far-reaching reforms and insisting on framing the problem as primarily military in nature.